Project Import Fails With Has No User Associated With The Watch Error

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Symptoms

When trying to import a project, the import fails with the following error in the UI

1 Watcher associated with issue id '337461' has no user associated with the watch

Cause

This error occurs because there is watcher or voter with NULL value.

(Auto-migrated image: description temporarily unavailable)

During the project import, JIRA will check for the watcher and voter association in all projects to prevent importing NULL userassociations to the destination instance.

Resolution

Always back up your data before making any database modifications. If possible, test any alter, insert, update, or delete SQL commands on a staging server first.

  1. Run the following SQL query to identify all the NULL watcher and/or voter in the instance

    1 SELECT * FROM userassociation WHERE source_name = '';
  2. Delete every the NULL user returns from the query above.

    1 DELETE FROM userassociation WHERE source_name = '';

    ⚠️ Please make sure that you have the latest XML backup before proceeding with the DELETE statement above.

Updated on April 8, 2025

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